A mother has made an emotional plea to Los Angeles police to locate her 26-year-old daughter who went missing after leaving a Goodwill store more than a week ago.

In an open letter posted Monday on the Facebook page Help Find Maricela Garcia, her mother — who shares her daughter’s name — pleaded with police to examine a smashed cell phone and a choker found during a search over the weekend.

“That choker in your evidence room? That was her favorite thing to wear. I swear she would sleep and shower in it if she could!” wrote the mother, who lives with her daughters in Tarzana. “If you look at it now, it’s obvious from the way it looked to have been ripped off her neck, that she will never wear it again. It’s all torn and tattered. I cannot allow myself to think of how it came to be that way.”

Three days before Maricela Garcia vanished, she told Sarah that she was guarding a secret and seemed distraught, but would not reveal any details.

On Saturday, a group of volunteers — including a canine handler and her search dog — combed the area where Maricela was last seen, on a commercial strip of the San Fernando Valley thoroughfare Sherman Way.

Edgar Garcia, the missing woman’s brother, said a smashed cell phone, which did not have a SIM card, was found in a planter behind the Goodwill building. The frayed-looking black choker, similar to the one his sister wore, was found behind a dumpster outside a nearby medical building, he said.

Officers from LAPD’s West Valley Division collected the two items Saturday and said they would be turned over to the Missing Persons Unit, which is handling the case.

LAPD’s Media Relations Section had no immediate comment Monday. Detective M. Palmer of the Missing Persons Unit said last week that they had not yet found any evidence of foul play.

Lori Wells, a canine handler and president of the nonprofit organization Search Dogs 24/7, searched the area Saturday with her Catahoula Leopard Dog, Katrina. Katrina is a scent-specific trailing dog, which means when she’s handed an article of clothing that belongs to a missing person, she can pick up that scent through crowds, parking lots and even wilderness, Wells said.

On Saturday, Katrina and Wells started their search at the Goodwill. The dog then wanted to go into a nearby supermarket, where a cigarette was found in the back — the brand family members said Maricela likes to smoke — and then into a nearby church. The dog became “very animated” near the church and wanted inside, Wells said. The dog entered and sat on a pew inside, which “to me, that’s an indication our missing person was there,” Wells said.

Two women had previously said they saw a woman matching Maricela’s description inside St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church that night looking worried or upset, Edgar Garcia said.

The search dog led Wells to the back parking lot of the church and then to the back of a medical office building a few blocks down from the Goodwill. Wells noted there were security cameras there and told the family in case they are able to view footage that might be useful to them, she said.

“I left the family with some more clues and some more possibilities to work on,” said Wells. She described her all-volunteer search and rescue canine unit, which relies on donations, as “highly trained and certified” to meet the needs of the public and law enforcement.

It was behind a large trash bin in back of the medical building that the choker was discovered by volunteers, Edgar Garcia said.

Meanwhile, the mother described her daughter as talented, kind and “fiercely protective” of her sister. She would have never willingly left her 23-year-old sister, Sarah Garcia, to fend for herself the night she disappeared, she said.

“Please find out why (Maricela) was …so scared,” her mother wrote in the letter. “Please find out why her scent ended in that dumpster in the very far corner of a dark parking lot where no one would have gone by themselves. But most of all, please find my daughter.”